Blood on the Tracks

There are many ways of learning about history and fictional accounts have always been one; Lawrence Patchett’s ‘frontier tales’ present themselves at first as short lessons in local history, delivered in stories of characters real and imagined. We could get greater detail — and analysis — from any of the flood of books and articles that have appeared on the shelves as history in the past thirty years, following the boom that grew from research for Treaty of Waitangi claims, and latterly, online historical newspaper publishing.

The difference with overtly historical fiction is that it hopefully reaches a wider audience by virtue of its storytelling mode; with the fiction writer’s devices employed to take us inside the characters’ hearts and minds, we can come to understand and even identify with fellow human beings from an earlier time and a different place. Is this then what Patchett is about, or does he have higher, trickier, literary-fictive goals that are more concerned with style and technique — with play and craft — than straight narrative development and resolution? Story by story, some patterns do emerge.

In the title piece, ‘David’, a born-again Pākehā narrator works the machinery of the tale. Smith, an injured Pākehā-Māori he finds on the roadside is a time-traveller who fulfils a childhood fantasy of Old New Zealand for the jobless David. Finding this nineteenth century visitor becomes a distraction from his own present troubles. He employs his newfound knowledge (colonial history and te reo Māori) in an attempt to connect with his unlikely charge; Smith takes to his twentieth century hospitalisation so well, he learns to use a television remote. Eventually, breaking suddenly out of his taciturn and mysterious mask, he begins to recount tall tales to entertain the hapless David, whose home relationship hits the rocks as he obsesses with Smith.

He finally gets to take him back, off the beaten track to reunite with Hine, the wounded man’s Māori wife who has been waiting offstage. The story line seems to run like this: wishy-washy liberal meets a colonial ghost and becomes a ghost writer for the time traveller’s tall stories. Do we learn much about the passions and concerns of either player, or their times? Not really: the inner workings of the tale poke self-consciously through what is actually a very well-worked narrative; it is confident and it flows, but doesn’t seem to go anywhere. It feels as if Patchett is trying to educate the reader with his own discoveries; it was difficult to suspend the kind of disbelief this story demands.

What follows however, in ‘The Pathway’, is a believable rendering of the New Zealand death: in this case, a missionary drowning. This is a much more assured portrait of missionary life, one that is sympathetic, and where the Māori language elements seem more natural and less strained. It is simple in comparison with the first story: more conventional, less self-consciously biographical perhaps. It shows a care for history, a feel for the people and the times — even a refreshing lack of irony, invited perhaps when the widowed wife of the drowned minister, Burtt shows cracks in her faith, under the weight of sudden grief. We never quite get to find out why this man insisted on riding his mount over a swollen river by crouching precariously on its back, and sliding off to his death. This is beautifully made in terms of tone and craft, but is lacking in any psychological depth that might reveal something more than what we have seen: a slice of missionary life amongst Māori.

‘All Our Friends and Ghosts’ is closer in time: Hunt, a council employee and blogger has created a successful website, Fabian Life and plans to turn the Fabian feminist Maud Pember Reeves into a hologram, walking the streets of Wellington. Her lively ghost intercepts him and proceeds to turn his life upside down by wrecking his plans. Here, Patchett’s melding of local history and magic realism seem more effective and less self-conscious than the Pākehā-Māori tale that opens the collection. This reimagining of Maud as a stroppy shade sabotaging a twenty-first century geek’s plans to further his own ambitions inhabits territory that will be familiar to readers of Nigel Cox’s Skylark Lounge.

‘In My Brother’s Blood’, two orphans, separated after their father’s death by drowning in the Shetlands in the 1790s meet again on separate sides of an anti-sealing stoush in Fiordland in 1802. Edward the younger has joined a bizarre Orderists cult, while his rebellious brother Cameron ends up in a sealing crew, where they confront one another, and the sealer drowns. The message seems to be that seeking comfort and security endangers the conscience in Edward’s case, while Cameron’s fate seems nobler, if futile. The narrative sweep, the descriptive powers at work and the imagining of the relationship are impressive, but it is hard to be emotionally engaged by the shallow depiction of the brothers’ relationship and their unlikely confrontation in wild New Zealand. Is Patchett warming up for the novel that would give him the scope he seems to need in order to develop his undoubted fictionalising gifts?

The next vignette, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, imagines two incidents in the life of the future Premier Dick Seddon during the time he was a publican at Kumara serving the gold miners. Slight, yet colourful and richly detailed with a fine ear for dialogue, it’s another bar exercise that sees this writer limbering up confidently, without ever coming on stage and giving a full performance. Not so with ‘A Hesitant Man’: a survivor of the wreck of the steamer Penguin in 1909 meets one of his rescuers at a remembrance service for the dead, where they confront again the horror of the days that followed the shipwreck. The issues brought to life here are survivor guilt and self-loathing; it is an assured piece and while — as with many of these stories — it seems to lack the traditional ‘turn’ expected in the genre, the tension that develops in the exchange between them, victim and rescuer, offers greater satisfactions than many of the other pieces. Things don’t just happen, here they accrue meaning and depth.

The same cannot be said for ‘Claim of Blood’. It’s 1930 – or is it 2010? A ghost bails up Press editor Alan Duff in his Christchurch office (or is Duff the ghost, and our narrator…something else?). This is the slightest piece so far. The next offering, ‘The Knight of the Range’, appears to be sampling a Zane Grey story; sandwiched between two parts of a cowboy tale, we meet Grey in the Bay of Islands hauling up marlin and mako, in that veritable anglers’ El Dorado. Grey emerges from this account as a vain celebrity, intent on shaming the locals into fishing the way he does; quite how it all hangs together we’re unsure, but as usual, Patchett brings the setting and characters convincingly to life.

His skills do come together finally on ‘The Road to Tokomairiro’, in what is perhaps the most fully realised story in the collection. This small masterpiece shows Patchett’s narrative flair, his gift for believable period dialogue and some sense of the human condition with frontier people located in a particular time and place. There are no tricks, no sleight of hand: Harry, a Cobb & Co whip, has a wheel come off in a drive through Central Otago and one of his passengers, a newlywed husband, dies. The inquest absolves Harry of blame; driving on two days later, he shares his driver’s seat with the Reverend Keane, a country cleric also involved in the accident. Keane is tormented by scrupulosity and a need to find God’s will in the calamity just past. Harry tells him a yarn from his Australian days, and miraculously, gets the minister to laugh. It’s all sweetly done, with a perfect final line: ‘Tokomairiro, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Forty minutes, please.’We care about these people: Patchett here makes sure we are involved.

‘The Snack Machine’ is a slighter piece about a step-parent babysitting his partner’s seven-year old son Lucien, playing football, and fixing a broken vending machine. Māori language is again worked into the story here (the boy shows some impatience with the narrator’s apprentice efforts to practice it on him). In this laudable attempt to normalise the inclusion of te reo Māori in Pākehā storytelling, it’s a pity that some of the proofreading lets him down, misspelling titiro (to look, or inspect) as tītoro.

The penultimate offering, ‘The Man Beside the Pool’ is a Depression-era story, based on the life of Katerina Nehua, a Ngāpuhi woman living in Sydney who entered an endurance swim in the tidal baths at Manly to win the £300 first prize. After almost 48 hours, she was pulled in, coming second; this fictionalised account views the event through the eyes of a desperate unemployed man who fails to last the distance, but with his wife and baby, gets fed. It conjures up an Australian version of They Shoot Horses Don’t They? — of the lengths those without work in this pitiless era would go to in order to survive. It shares its aim with much of what Patchett does successfully throughout: bringing the past to life through unusual incidents, without comment.

‘What Luck’, the book’s tailfeather, gives a brief glimpse of a Pākehā-Māori seaman and his pregnant wahine; a man who, having ‘taken the blanket’, might just be the mysterious Smith who turned up on the roadside in the first story. It’s the same area and he’s wounded — but we don’t get much more than that.

What we do get in Patchett’s first full-length outing is a sense of promise, a bubbling potential that shows him fully possessed of all the elements required to make lasting human fictions. Some of these stories move the reader in the mysterious ways he no doubt intends; others don’t seem to go far enough and deep enough into the human heart, leaning too hard for support on the incidents from the past that inspired them. What is exciting and stimulating about the blood on these tracks is that here is evidence of a writer who has got what it takes. Patchett is ready and willing to venture amongst the overgrown thickets of our colonial history, to fossick about in abandoned sites for traces of gold that others have missed.

JEFFREY PAPAROA HOLMANis a Senior Adjunct Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Canterbury. He was awarded the Creative New Zealand University of Iowa Residency for 2012. His latest collection of poems is Shaken Down 6.3, published by Canterbury University Press in 2012.